The American government has been under a lot of pressure in the past 10-15 years. From the welling up of the ongoing constitutional crisis - Clinton's impeachment, 2000 election, Obama's election, Congressional stalemate, to serial "bubble and pop" economy - dot com, housing, government?, to rolling international challenges - Iraq, the difficult marriage with China, halting climate change efforts, European malaise. The pot is boiling over. While America has always been a pressure cooker, its not a bomb.

With a substantial portion of the new generation who are entering American public service being tech- and network-savvy, a new whistle valve has been added to the already screaming pot of democracy. The internet generation has started reshaping US politics and will thoroughly do so in the decades to come.

What is encouraging about Bradley Manning and Snowden is that idealists are still coming to serve the government, that they have thoroughly absorbed the lessons of freedom they have been taught since elementary school, that they believe the government should reflect their values, and that they are not cynical about America as an idea. That is very healthy.

Governments make evermore treaties, evermore speeches, and evermore complex set of rules. Enter the countless lawyers, lobbyists, and spin-writers. And where this fails, comes tunneling the whole infrastructure, unabashed thanks to limits of policing manpower, devotion, and integrity -- similarly at the judicial level, and most certainly the political.

Then the matter festers, and it is just a matter of death by bureaucratic ice, or revolutionary fire.

The almost 2000 year old question of the poet Juvenal remains today, only evermore bitter, raw, and sardonic -- quis custodiet ipsos custodes? -- "Who guards the guardians?"

The only guardian for human society is the inner being of the human him or herself -- and their relationships with others. Can we defeat the evergrowing monster of the ego, and evergrowing hollowness of our connections with others?

Yes--the answers stand before us if we've still the will to grasp them: Integral education, and a media-induced culture of values steeped in mutual responsibility and guarantee.

But, these are the only real answers. How many towers of cards must collapse before we take the pill? It only appears bitter--but will prove the sweetest imaginable repast. This, especially compared with our present world, evermore so, its present course.

is it not implicitly expected that every country is spying on every other. I thought that what matters most is the commitment of each G20 country to macro changes in the current account imbalances. with every country printing and stimulating seems like that commitment was a false promise.

In answer to Mr Beck, doesn't the G20 include a major power that incarcerates detainees indefinitely without trial, commits extra-judicial killings by remote control in foreign countries (some of them allies), illicitly surveils its own citizens as well as internet and communications users worldwide, rewards and celebrates the perpetrators of the 2007/8 financial crash, consumes 25% of the world's declining fossil fuels despite having only 4.6% of the world's population, promotes patented biotechnological agriculture that impoverishes foreign farmers, violates international law by proxy (one example: Bolivian president's jet impeded), airbrushes dubious general elections (e.g. 2000), renders inconvenient suspects for overseas torture, condones torture by waterboarding among other techniques, inculcates a supine national news media, instals and perpetuates convenient foreign dictatorships while working to topple other dictators who don't play ball, whips up fear incessantly as a smokescreen for the dismantling of its own constitution, and generally stomps on foreigners' human rights while lauding its own exceptionalism? Those who live in glass houses ...

I fully agree with you.
And the US is just continuing in a much more obvious and widespread manner what the British started before them, and what most probably any other nation is doing just not as "up in your face" as the Americans.
It is the typical case of the "emperor without clothes" talking about promoting democracy and freedom when those "promoting it" have neither true democracy nor true freedom.
What Snowden revealed is much more serious than what Nixon was impeached for, it is not even the same magnitude.
But today nobody is truly surprised or want to do anything serious about it, we already quietly swallowed up the "artificially created" Iraq war, the British phone hacking scandals, dismantling democracy in Europe and the US in favor of the markets and the financial institutions and many other similar events.
The whole global human society is paralyzed watching helplessly as the train is running towards the broken bridge.
The ongoing revolution in Egypt is a very good case study to show it is irrelevant who the desperate public tries to lift into power.
It does not matter today if a dictator, a religious organization, military or even seemingly democratic parliament rules.
The end result is always the same, because the main, root cause does not change.
It is our inherently egoistic and self-centered human nature that drives us to corruption, exploitation and ruthless competition, and until we figure out how to adjust and ride on top of this nature as a rodeo rider so we can use it for positive mutual goals, we have no chance.

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